It comes as no surprise that there is a wealth of information on the internet about email marketing, but quite often these blogs are all about number crunching, sales jargon and stat counting.

Here are our top sites for anyone who is working with html based email, it doesn't matter whether you are a market research analyst, campaign advisor, coder, or designer there is something here for everyone.

Travelbound provide exciting holidays for schools and students alike. Their desire to add this excitement and sense of adventure to the email marketing lead them to the creative team at pure360.com.

Andy Parker, html - email designer at Pure360 takes us through the process of creating an email template which stays on-brand and makes email truly interactive.

Ash Richards, head of the design team at Pure360.com talks us through the design process behind Moda in Pelle's email newsletter. From design proofing to finished template we get the full insight into what goes on during the creative process of html email design.

We’ve gathered for you the TOP 15 Articles of 2008, highlighting what you the readers have been most interested in this year when it comes to email marketing matters.

Ranked by order of clicks through received, they are in effect the reader’s choice, the most visited and most read articles released through the Email Marketing Manual newsletter this year.

So in case you’ve missed out on these top tips, insights and guides on email marketing over the last 12 months, or perhaps are new to our subscription service, here is 2008’s best of the best.

Hello and welcome to the all new Email Marketing Manual!

With another year drawing to a close and as we creep up to our 2nd birthday the Email Marketing Manual team decided it was time to shed off the chrysalis and show the beautiful butterfly ready to beat its illustrious wings.

We wanted to become more involved with our readers, some of whom email us regularly with useful inside scoops, questions, answers and everything in-between about email marketing.

Yukka.co.uk is a boutique online retailer specialising in urban clothing labels. Their monthly email newsletters promote new, limited edition and exclusive labels, aiming to increase traffic to their site and generate sales.

This kind of acquisition campaign email requires clear messaging that taps into the key needs of the target audience. However, with a lack of focus and with vital information hard to find, are readers being left cold?

Current Design

Join the Email Marketing Manual on Twitter

When creating any form of advertising it's vital to get the right balance between text and imagery.
Too much text and the viewer will lose interest, too little and they'll be left bewildered as to what it is they are looking at.

Applying this to email design adds a few extra considerations: spam rating, legibility, cross platform bugs and more. In this best practice guide we are going to look a little more in depth into these areas and their implication for HTML email design. By the end you should be confident in how to correctly render images in emails along with keeping the right balance between text and graphics. As you'll see, when it comes to email, design matters.

Creative Leisure Systems provides a range of stimulating child entertainment products aimed at businesses whose customers often have toddlers with them.

One of the most difficult hurdles to overcome in email creation for a designer is its regressive nature. Whilst the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and browser developers improve and enhance at an almost inhuman rate html mail delivery has kept its front foot firmly in the past.

The restrictiveness of its HTML4.01 foundations can cause many a headache, unavoidable use of tables for structure, forced ‘web-safe' colour schemes and so many essential present day CSS attributes unavailable. A beautifully crafted design in Photoshop can soon become a blocky unyielding behemoth, far from the designer's original concept.

So what preparation tasks can be taken onboard before working on that all important eshot or newsletter?